Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy confirmed that the PoW exchange, the first in five months, happened on Thursday.
“We are bringing our people home — 157 Ukrainians. Warriors from the Armed Forces, National Guard, and the State Border Guard Service. Soldiers, sergeants, and officers. Along with our defenders, civilians are also returning. Most of them had been in captivity since 2022,” Zelenskyy said in a post on X.
Russia also received the return of 157 of its PoWs.
The last prisoner exchange between Russia and Ukraine was in October, when the sides swapped 185 soldiers and 20 civilians.
Zelenskyy explained that Moscow had halted the swaps. “They are not particularly interested in exchanging people, because they do not feel that it gives them anything. They believe it benefits us. But I think they should also be thinking about their own people — their own soldiers,” Zelenskyy told reporters in Kyiv last week.
Since Kyrylo Budanov, former head of Ukrainian military intelligence, joined the negotiating group, Russia began to take the negotiations more seriously, Zelenskyy said last week. “I believe it was a higher-level delegation than before, considering what the people who represented Russia this time are responsible for. We saw this as a more serious opportunity for discussion,” Zelenskyy said.